Certain Things Last: The Selected Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson - Hardcover

Anderson (1876-1941) is well remembered for Winesburg, Ohio , the collection of linked stories that fathomed small-town America, but his most individual work can be found elsewhere, especially in short fiction. So it's with a sense of anticipation that a reader approaches this collection, edited by the executor of Anderson's estate and including five stories never previously published in book form. It turns out to be an uneven collection, as Anderson's imagination rises and falls. Some of his work is dated--depicting a time of relative innocence, though he questioned it--and yet the best stories baffle efforts to place them categorically or otherwise. The provincial limitations that he evoked so tellingly in "The Man Who Became a Woman," for example, still contain the sense of enormous possibility, rendered in a way that is immensely moving. "What I want to do is to express in my book a sense of the strangeness that has gradually, since I was a boy, been creeping more and more into my feeling about everyday life," a typical Anderson narrator reflects, disarmingly stubborn in his refusal to further complicate a chimerical world. The stories here are full of that refusal, and those most true to it will certainly last.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This collection of 30 post- Winesburg, Ohio stories includes three previously unpublished and six previously uncollected stories. Several others, including two that had been radically revised, have been restored by Modlin to what he believes were Anderson's original intentions. The stories, which generally address the storytelling process, are wonderfully well crafted and still enjoyable today. Using mostly male narrators and often involving initiation rites, they give us a male perspective of small-town Midwestern life during the first 40 years of this century. The unquestioned racism and sexism occasionally revealed by the narrators may disturb some readers, but these attitudes were realities of American life that must be faced. Highly recommended, particularly for American literature collections in academic libraries.
- Judy Mimken, Saginaw Valley State Univ., Mich.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.